Building Again?

This week I came across two stories of companies planning to build brand-new data centers from the ground up. As my 13-year-old son would say: What's up with that? Given the large amount of finished data center space available for sale, it's hard to understand what would prompt new construction at this point in the life of the industry.

First came the story in the Washington Business Journal about Recovery Point, a Gaithersburg, Md. disaster recovery and data storage company that plans to spend $41.2 million to build a 120,000 square foot facility in Germantown, Md. The site will be designed with a data center to accommodate up to 4,000 servers and enough seats for 1,000 temporarily displaced employees. Companies will pay a monthly fee for the option of using the space in the event of a disaster, and additional fees if they ever need to use it.

The notion of getting paid for empty data center space is appealling. I've talked with a number of industry veterans working on similar business plans, but in each case the idea is to take advantage of existing facilities acquired dirt cheap.

Today the Morning Journal of Columbiana County, Ohio has a story about plans by Fiber Media Inc. to build a brand new 70,000 square foot data center to serve as a switch site and disaster recovery center.

"The project we're discussing has the potential to put the county on the map like Silicon Valley" and Boston's high-tech corridor, said Columbiana County Port Authority Executive Director Tracy Drake.

I think we've all heard that one before. It leaves one wondering if Drake has spoken recently with anyone in Silicon Valley or Boston about what's happening in those markets. Still, I suppose that if you're determined to have a data center to serve Ohio towns like Lisbon, East Liverpool or Leetonia, your options are pretty limited. While the telecom crash has left any number of built-out data centers available in the greater Washington area where Recovery Point operates, perhaps the same can't be said of Columbiana County, Ohio.

Maybe I'm the one that's crazy, and this is the right time for contrarians to step forward and build rather than buy. Or perhaps, if you try to stand conventional wisdom on its head for too long, you wind up with dizzy ideas.